This illusion will make you feel as if you’ve fallen asleep and landed in Mario’s mushroom kingdom.
Mario may be a children’s cartoon, but this misconception about the Nintendo icon appears to be unsolvable by the brightest minds. The picture has gone viral on social media after being posted on Reddit three years ago.
“Is Mario going up or down?” asks the pixelated perception test, which is actually a frame from the 1989 cartoon “The Super Mario Bros Super Show.”
The turtle-mashing mushroom muncher is seen rushing down a spiral staircase to rescue kidnapped Joilet in the following picture, but his destination is uncertain. The puzzle rings resemble the Shroeder stairwell, which was designed in an iconic drawing and interpreted as stairs running from top left to bottom right or an upside-down version of it.
The Italian plumber’s trajectory is only discernible by individuals with “top IQs.”
The mind-bending picture, needless to say, had puzzle fans feeling as if they’d been struck with Mario’s enormous hammer.
One perplexed brain teaser enthusiast exclaimed, “WTF” Another asked if anyone had a video of the event so they could cheat.
One viewer asked, “who builds stairs with the steps angled 45 degrees from horizontal?” “Bowser,” offered a “Super Mario” devotee.
Fortunately, some users correctly deduced that Mario was going up the stairs based on his foot placement. The iconic plumber’s left foot wouldn’t be so high in the air when he was descending head first unless he was toppling down the steps, as many users astutely noted.
“You can tell by his feet he has to be going up,” one eagle-eyed puzzle fan noted, to which another replied, “Unless he just tripped lol.”
Take a look at this collection of corneal confusers, which range from literal snakes in the grass to testing that make you go colorblind.
